“Now China is getting too expensive to do the low-tech work it’s known for. African nations such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Rwanda, Senegal, and Tanzania want their share of the 80 million manufacturing jobs that China is expected to export, according to Justin Lin Yifu, a former World Bank chief economist who teaches economics at Peking University.

“where [in Ethiopia] wages of about $40 a month are less than 10 percent of what comparable Chinese workers may make. Just as companies discovered with China when they began manufacturing there in the 1980s, Ethiopia’s workforce is untrained, its power supply is intermittent, and its roads are so bad that trips can take six times as long as they should. ‘Ethiopia is exactly like China 30 years ago,’ says Zhang, 55, who quit the military in 1982 to make shoes from his home in Jiangxi province with three sewing machines. He now supplies such well-known brands as Nine West and Guess

“Almost three years after Zhang began his Ethiopian adventure * * * he says he’s unhappy * * * and struggling to raise productivity from a level that he says is about a third of China’s. Transportation and logistics that cost as much as four times what they do in China are prompting Huajian to set up its own trucking company, according to Zhang. That will free Huajian from using the inefficient local haulers, but it can’t fix the roads. It takes two hours to drive 30 kilometers (18 miles) to the Huajian factory from the capital along the main artery.

“In a country where 80 percent of the labor force is in agriculture, manufacturers don’t have to worry about finding new workers. The population of about 96 million is Africa’s second-largest after Nigeria’s. * * * Deborah Brautigam, author of The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa and a professor of international development and comparative politics at Johns Hopkins University [says,] “It [Ethiopia] could become the China of Africa.”

(b) “Ethiopian workers walking through the parking lot of Huajian Shoes’ factory outside Addis Ababa in June chose the wrong day to leave their shirts untucked. The company’s president, just arrived from China, spotted them through the window, sprang up, and ran outside. Zhang Huarong, a former People’s Liberation Army soldier, harangued them in Chinese, tugging at one man’s polo shirt and forcing another worker’s into his pants. Amazed, the workers stood silent until the eruption subsided.”
(i) For Huajian Shoes, see Huajian Group 华坚集团 (NOT 华建, whose name is used by a handful of unrelated enterprises in China)www.huajian.com/index.html
(“中国最大女鞋生产集团之一 * * * 1996年成立于广东省东莞市”)

(c) Nine West
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_West
(table: “Founder(s) Jerome Fisher and Vince Camuto”)
(d) Nigeria (2006 census 140,431,790, 2013 estimate 174,507,539 (7th largest in the world; based on CIA World Factbook, according to a notation) Wikipedia

(e) “the factory [in Ethiopia, owned by Huajian] began operating in January 2012 [where] workers cut, glue, stitch, and sew Marc Fisher leather boots destined for the US market”
(i) Marc Fisher founded Marc Founder Footwear LLC (now also doing handbags) in 2005 at Greenwich, Connecticut. It has its own Marc Fisher brand, but also makes shoes for name brands such as Guess.
(ii) Hayley Phelan,
fashionista.com/2012/04/the-gucci-vs-guess-courtroom-drama-continues-marc-fisher-cries-admits-to-buying-75000-in-gucci-merchandise
(“His [Marc Fisher’s] father, just so you know, founded Nine West in 1978; Fisher launched his own namesake company in 2005, with Guess being their first big licensee”)